9 September 2019

Robert Burns with Edinburgh College of Art students

 

A week in Edinburgh this August included a visit to the elegant national galleries and introduced us to many new Scottish painters. Here are some of the female students of the Edinburgh College of Art (c.1911) with the painter Robert Burns. When the ECA opened in 1908 (merging two smaller Academies) it charged an annual fee of £5 and accepted women on an equal basis to men. Because the fees were relatively small, working men were able to attend in the evening which meant that many of the daytime classes were full of female pupils; this must have been one such class. Dorothy Johnstone (1892-1980) is in the front row, fourth from the left.